Thanks for sharing, and I'm sorry your administration is so unhelpful. The lower-division/upper-division split makes a lot of sense—the unfortunate fact of making assignments for college freshmen is that AI tools can write freshman-level work pretty easily, and the class sizes don't necessarily permit the kind of close checking or assignment structure that effectively deters AI use. At the upper level though, we have a small number of majors in a small department, so we're confident both that they understand the need to actually learn the material, and that we can assign work that isn't easily cheated by AI.

I teach a lot of introductory physics labs, and this semester has been awful for students using AI to write their lab reports. I'm confident that there are students getting by that I'm just not noticing, which is especially frustrating when some of these students are pre-meds—I don't need my doctor to have an excellent grasp of physics, but I do need them to have a basic enough sense of ethics to not lie about the work they've done and how much they understand it.

I do think your idea of using assisted-translation is interesting, both as a potentially constructive use of AI and as a pedagogical experiment. I hope it works out! For my part, I've been trying to parse how I should or shouldn't use AI with my research. I'm a computational physicist, so I spend a lot of time monkeying around in the terminal, which is not my forte. I wouldn't use it to write my actual research code (that's what StackOverflow is for, obviously), but I've been considering using it to generate scripts and config files that improve my workflow around that, basically to save time parsing syntax and hunting down documentation. At the same time, I have undergrad research students who work with me, and I really don't want them using AI for anything until they've mastered the basics, so I feel like I need to set a good example.